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Judge Parker, 6/27/17

Oh, hey, good news: Abbey’s secret half-sister was trying to break Sophie’s will by keeping her in a pit and make Sophie hate Abbey too, but she didn’t! Everyone’s happy and they love each other again! So that problem is all solved and everything is all right in Parkerville … except whoops Randy’s beloved pregnant wife still hasn’t been found after she vanished doing One Last Job for the CIA, and he’s taking it pretty hard. Lots of takeout is to be expected, of course, but sitting on the couch staring at a teddy bear? That’s some high-quality lost-wife moping.

Fortunately, Judge Parker Senior is here to get his son to snap out of it. “Randy, you can’t live like this,” he pleads. “Someone’s gotta be the judge in this town, and I’m busy promoting my terrible, unreadable book full time! You’ve got to move on! Do you think I just stared at a damn stuffed animal all day when your mother mysteriously vanished? Of course not! I got a new, younger, hotter wife, just like I have every five years ever since! Pull yourself together, man!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/27/17

“So, Niki took me to this show the arts high kids put on … and they invited me to this weekly game night thing … and I just want to know … am I a nerd now? Remember how I used to be a sexy badass? Is there any going back, or am I stuck like this forever?”

Dick Tracy, 6/27/17

Sorry, comics creators carefully working on the perfect setup-punchline combination: nothing in the funny pages this week will possibly make me laugh more than “That music! Is it ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba?”

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Beetle Bailey, 6/25/17

This is an example of a strip that only really works with the top row of throwaway panels — so called because they’re often excised by papers looking to cram more into their comics section — in place. Without them, this is just a basic Beetle Bailey strip about General Halftrack giving a long, boring speech about himself. But those first panels drive home a pair of exquisite yet offsetting tragedies: that Halftrack, desperate for affirmation and yet wholly unloved, has arranged this ceremony for himself; and that Halftrack’s creeping dementia has caused him to forget that he’s done so, which might allow him to feel briefly good about his life during the ceremony. I assume that the award is small scale model of the pyramid in which he will soon be buried, along with his staff.

Dennis the Menace, 6/25/17

Wow, if I had to guess which Sunday strip was going to peel away our assumptions and get us talking about the hidden nature of uncompensated domestic labor, Dennis the Menace would not have been high on the list.

Judge Parker, 6/25/17

“You always ask that five minutes before it’s done. And you always ask me, as if I’m making dinner! Our paid servant is doing all the work! She’s right there, you could at least make eye contact with her.”

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Blondie, 5/24/17

I gotta respect today’s Blondie: at first I thought it was going to try to go back to the well of “Oh no, the scientific classifications of objects in our solar system have changed since I was a child, and I have not gotten over it despite the fact that it happened literally more than a decade ago.” But then it took a sharp turn into much less explored territory: ever since the turn of the millennium, all of what we perceive as our “existence” is really a vast computationally generated simulacrum that we can dimly understand by thinking about our own crude social networks. What is a planet? What is real? The only ones who know are those who set the rules for our reality — and those rules, and their makers, are utterly inscrutable to us.

Dick Tracy, 5/24/17

Meanwhile, Dick and the Major Crimes Unit are closing in on the Margies, who are not only mid-level cosplay convention grifters but also, apparently, anti-Semitic vandals? Ugh. Anyway, all Dick Tracy trufans are going to be thrilled when Dick cracks this case using one of his most beloved and widely known skills: satchel recognition at a distance.

Judge Parker, 5/24/17

Wow, Abby’s dad shaves and puts on a nice suit when he poses for a photo with his secret family. But when he’s just chillin’ at home, arguing with his real wife about his infidelities, he grows a gross mustache and wears a collared shirt on top of another collared shirt for some reason. Sad!